“Yes, I know. Come on.”
“What will we lift?” Annika asked as she followed Riley out.
“I bet she finds a way to make pumping iron a game.” Sawyer smiled after her, started to sip some beer, caught Sasha’s glance.
“I’ve got something,” he decided. “Be back in a couple minutes to set up, Doyle.”
“I want a fresh pad.” Sasha stood, moved out of the room with him. And left Doyle and Bran alone.
“My grandmother lives,” Bran began. “She walks five miles daily, rain or shine, has a cat named Morgana, pesters my grandfather over his cigars, and enjoys a whiskey every evening. It will be a hard day for me when her time comes.”
He paused, considered. “My family comes here from time to time, and came during the time I was having this house built. My grandmother walked the bones of the house with me in the early stages. She said to me: ‘Boy, you’ve chosen well. This place has known love and grief, laughter and tears, as most have. But this place more than most. You’ll honor that even as you make it your own.’”
“She’s a seer?”
“She’s not, no. A witch, of course, but not a seer with it. She felt it, I think, felt what was here, as I felt it. Something that called to the blood. Yours calling to mine.” Bran leaned forward toward friend, toward brother. “You lost your family, Doyle, some through cruelty, some through the natural order of things. I want to say you have family still.”
“Whether I want it or not?”
Bran merely smiled. “Well now, we never can choose that, can we?”
He’d clicked with Bran, he had to admit it, quicker and easier than he’d clicked with anyone in recent, even distant memory. Something there, Doyle thought now, that had simply spoken to him.
In the blood.
“I’d stopped wanting it. Wanting family,” Doyle said. “That’s survival. For all your power, you don’t know what it is to see centuries of sunrises, to know at each dawn there’ll be no end for you, but there will for everyone who matters to you. If you let them matter.”
“I can’t know,” Bran agreed. “But I know what’s now matters, too. We’re blood, and before we knew that, we were comrades and friends. I’ve trusted you with my life, and the life of the woman I love. I would trust you again. There’s no closer bond than that.”
The bitter in the bittersweet still sat hard in his belly. “They brought me back here, the gods, the fates.”
“But not alone.”
Nodding slowly, Doyle met Bran’s dark eyes. “No, brother, not alone. So, here it started for me. It may be here we’ll finish it.”
• • •
As the day faded, Riley took a bowl of soup up to her room. She ate while doing more research. Over the years she’d been to Ireland, and this part of Ireland many times on digs. With her parents as a child on studies.
There would be caves—on land, under the sea—and ruins and stone circles. Until she’d read the journal she’d leaned toward the star being in or around Clare—but had opened to the possibility it fell in another part of Ireland.
But now she was certain Clare held the star.
The Fire Star had been in a cave under the water. Part of a rock in an underground cavern. It had called to Sasha.
The Water Star, again in the water, but this time part of the water, waiting for Annika to find the statue of the goddess and form it back into its brilliant blue.
Pattern would suggest the water again. A cave or cavern in the cold Atlantic waters off the coast. Ice, cold. That fit, too.
Would it sing or call as the other stars had? Who would hear it? Her money, for now, was on Doyle. Possibly Bran, but Doyle had the deepest roots here.
She’d be keeping an eye on him, just in case.
Annika would scout—as only a mermaid could—in the sea itself. And while she did, Riley determined she would dig in her own way, through books, the Internet, maps.
If nothing else, they could start eliminating. If Sasha had a vision or two to give them some direction, some bread crumbs, so much the better, but to Riley’s mind nothing replaced research and action based on it.
She lost herself in it, but this time—considering the race to strip down before the change—she’d set the alarm on her phone to go off ten minutes before sunset.